Introduction

A very common way to manipulate the givenness of referents in experimental research is the elicitation of semi-spontaneous speech by means of non-verbal stimuli, i.e., pictures or videos. One of the first elicitation studies, which manipulated the givenness of referents by means of non-verbal stimuli was conducted by Prentice (1967). In order to investigate the effect of givenness on the order of arguments in English, Prentice used cartoons depicting simple transitive actions of either human, animate or inanimate characters (e.g.,woman kicking girl;soldier starting fire;flower pot hitting girl). Each cartoon was paired with a cue slide which was presented before the actual cartoon and depicted one of the involved characters, i.e., either the subject or object of the target scene. The participants were shown both the cue slide and the cartoon one after another and then asked to give a short description of the scene shown in the cartoon. The results of the experiment revealed that the participants preferably produced active sentences, if the agents were given in the cue slides. Moreover, they produced significantly more passive constructions if the patients were contextually given than in cases where the agents were contextually given. In sum, the descriptions of the participants thus showed a strong preference to realize given before new arguments.

A similar design was used by MacWhinney and Bates (1978) who com-pared the effect of increasing newness and givenness on the use of six differ-ent sdiffer-entdiffer-ential devices (ellipsis, pronominalization, empathic stress, indefinite

article, definite article, initialization) in English, Italian and Hungarian. The non-visual stimuli in their study consisted of sets of three pictures, which were presented one after another. The first picture depicted a simple action which was supposed to be described by the participants using either (a) an intransitive sentence, (b) a simple transitive sentence, (c) a sentence with a subject and a locative or (d) a ditransitive sentence. The second and the third picture were used to increase the newness of one of the elements and likewise to increase the givenness of the remaining elements. Consider for instance the following sample descriptions in which the object increased in newness, while the subject and the verb increased in givenness, e.g., (1) A girl is eating an apple; (2)A girl is eating a cookie; (3)A girl is eating an ice-cream. The results of the study showed that ellipsis decreased with increased newness in all languages, while empathic stress increased with increased newness, but only in English and Italian. Furthermore, increased givenness was predominantly marked by increased ellipsis and the use of the indefinite article. However, MacWhinney and Bates did not find a strong correlation of word order with either givenness or newness, but a number of baseline effects relating to language differences as well as to interactions of language and age.

Prat-Sala (1997) analyzed the effect of inherent (i.e., animacy) and de-rived accessibility (i.e., discourse saliency) on the syntactic structure in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish (see also Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000 on English and Spanish). Prat-Sala used different context stories to manipulate the discourse salience of the entities. The salient en-tity (either agent or patient) was always presented in the beginning and was introduced with the focusing existential structure‘There was’and the demonstrative‘this’. Moreover, the salient entity was preceded by multiple adjectives. The non-salient entity always followed the salient one and did not have any additional properties. All stories ended with the question‘What happened?’. Consider (242) for a short story with a salient agent in (a) and a salient patient in (b).

(242) a. Agent = salient entity

There was this old rusty swing standing in a playground near a scooter, swaying and creaking in the wind. What happened?

b. Patient = salient entity

There was this old red scooter standing in a playground near a swing, with rusty wheels and scratched paint. What happened?

(Prat-Sala 1997: 172)

In order to answer the questions, the participants were shown a picture depicting both of the introduced entities involved in a transitive action. More-over Prat-Sala manipulated the animacy of the patients by using animate and inanimate patients. The results of the study revealed a preference to realize the salient entity in a more prominent position. This means the par-ticipants produced more canonical orders if the agent was salient and more non-canonical orders if the patient was salient. Furthermore, Prat-Sala found a significant interaction between discourse salience and animacy. Salient ani-mate entities were more likely to appear in a prominent position than salient inanimate entities. In sum, the results showed a cross-linguistic influence of inherent (animacy) and derived accessibility (discourse saliency) on speech production.

Arnold et al. (2000) investigated the effect of newness (given vs. new) and constituent weight (simple vs. complex) on the order of constituents in English. The participants of their elicitation study worked in pairs. One participant was assigned the role of giving instructions (=director), while the other had to follow these instructions (=actor). Within the study both partners were presented cards depicting sets of three characters as well as cards depicting single objects. The heaviness of the constituents was manipulated within the objects: simple (e.g.,ball) vs. complex (e.g.,blue spotted ball). By contrast to the objects, the three characters were all equally complex and differed only in their colors (e.g., yellow duck, orange duck, purple duck). Each trial was initiated by the actor asking a question, which established either the objects or the characters as given, e.g., What about the yellow duck, the orange duck, and the purple duck? The newness of the constituents was controlled by cue cards given to the actors. The directors also received cue cards specifying what objects should be assigned to which character. The results of the study revealed significant main effects of both complexity and newness as well as a significant interaction between both factors.

Another elicitation study was carried out by Christianson and Ferreira (2005) who analyzed the effect of contextual accessibility of agents and pa-tients on voice and constituent ordering in Odawa, which exhibits a tripartite alternation between active, inverse and passive verb forms. Christianson and Ferreira used black and white drawings of various transitive actions. All pictures were matched with one of the three following question types: (i) general questions (e.g., What is happening here?), (ii) agent-topicalizing questions (e.g.,What is the boy doing?, (iii) patient-topicalizing questions

(e.g., What is happening to the girl?). The results of the study showed that the speakers predominantly used active verbs in the general and the agent-topicalizing condition, while they preferred passive verb forms in the patient-topicalizing condition. In sum, their results revealed that the numbers of inverse/passive orders in Odawa is increasing with the question types (i.e., agent question < general question < patient question). Thus, Odawa speakers behave quite similar to English speakers.

A similar design was used by Skopeteas and Fanselow (2010b) who investigated the effect of givenness of agents and patients on the linearization of arguments in twelve different languages (German, Georgian, American English, Czech, Dutch, Québek French, Greek, Hungarian, Konkani, Yucatec Maya, Prinmi and Teribe). The participants were asked to describe pairs of pictures consisting of a context and a target picture. The context picture was always shown first and introduced an individual (either the agent or the patient of the target picture). The target picture depicted a scene in which the given individual was involved in an action, which was supposed to be encoded by a transitive verb with two arguments, e.g., a given agent and a new patient or a given patient and a new agent. The descriptions of the speakers revealed three different strategies to realize given patients that differed across the languages: (i) object-fronting-strategy: Georgian, Czech, Hungarian, Konkani, Prinmi and Teribe; (ii) passivation: German, American English, Québec French, Dutch and Yucatec Maya; (iii) canonical word-order: Greek. In sum, the study showed that all languages except Greek show a general preference forGiven-before-Neworders.

Féry et al. (2010) analyzed the effect of givenness of themes (=locatum) and locatives (=locative expressions) on role choice, word order, definiteness, and prosodic structure in English, Finnish, French, Georgian, German and Mandarin Chinese. They manipulated the givenness in spatial configurations by using toy animals. Regarding the interaction of givenness and word order, the results of the study were two-fold: Firstly, the results showed a cross-linguistic effect of givenness on the order of the locatum and the locative expression, i.e., given locata generally precede locative expressions, while new locata follow locative expressions. Secondly, the results also revealed some strong cross-linguistic differences: Whereas a subset of languages (English, French and Chinese) show an overall preference across all condi-tions to realize the locatum before the locative expression, another subset of languages (German, Finnish and Georgian) shows the reverse preference (i.e., locative expression < locatum).

Mykhaylyk et al. (2013) examined the role of givenness on the order of patients and recipients in Russian and Ukrainian ditransitive sentences.

In order to elicit the data, the participants were presented sets of three to four pictures depicting either transitive (=context pictures) or ditransitive actions (=target pictures). All pictures were presented with short stories, which introduced either the recipient or the patient of the target picture as contextually given. Each story ended with an elicitation question. The experimenters used the same materials for two participants groups: children and adults. However, the procedure was slightly different. While the children were asked to tell the stories to a hand-puppet slide-by-slide, the adults were asked to describe the pictures to the experimenter and to use the keywords and ditransitive verbs (giveorshow) which were presented to them together with the pictures. The results of the adults showed a significant effect of givenness on the order of constituents. This means that the participants preferred patient<recipient orders if the patient was presented in the context pictures, while they preferred recipient<patient orders if the recipient was contextually given. By contrast, the children in the study revealed a general preference to realize recipients before patients.

The present elicitation study investigates the effect of givenness on the position of arguments in Turkish, Russian and Urum. The study consists of four experiments that examine the linearization preferences between (a) subjects and non-subjects and (b) different configurations with pairs of non-subject arguments. In the case of (a) the experiments investigate the following two configurations: agents vs. patientsandthemes vs. locatives.

The first configuration involves nominative and accusative arguments with transitive verbs, the second one nominative and oblique arguments with prepositions or locative case. The contrast between these two configurations is relevant, because it has been observed that Scrambling non-subjects over subjects is less likely with structural cases (i.e., nominative and accusative) than with inherent cases, which are (inherently) associated with certainθ -positions (i.e., pre-positions and locatives) (Woolford 2006: 112). In the case of (b) the experiments examine the following configurations: recipients vs.

patientsand instruments vs. patients. The first configuration involves the two lower arguments of ditransitive verbs and is assumed to be expressed by a dative-accusative contrast. The second configuration analyzes the effect of givenness on the linearization preferences between adjuncts (i.e., instruments) and accusative arguments. On the basis of these assumptions, the study examines the following hypotheses:

(i) Since scrambling non-subjects over subjects is not very likely with structural cases, the linearization of agents and patients is cross-linguistically assumed to be rather weakly affected by givenness.

(ii) The linearization ofthemes and locatives is affected by givenness.

Contextually given themes trigger THE<LOC orders, whereas contex-tually given locatives trigger LOC<THE orders.

(iii) The linearization ofrecipients vs. patients is affected by givenness.

Contextually given recipients trigger REC<PAT orders, whereas con-textually given patients trigger PAT<REC orders.

(iv) The linearization of instruments vs. patients is affected by given-ness. Contextually given instruments trigger INS<PAT orders, whereas contextually given patients trigger PAT<INS orders.